Executive overreach is Trump's campaign platform. Is this what tea party conservatives want?

“Who are you supporting for President?” my buddy said to the man at the airport bar.

“Donald Trump!” the man replied without hesitation.

“Why?”

“Well,” said the man, “I hate my boss, I hate my job, and Trump is going to tell them all to go to hell.”

* * *

I haven't heard a better explanation of the Republican primary for president.

At the core of Trump’s candidacy is a call for greater executive authority, with willful disregard for the constitutional limits placed on our chief executive. Trump specifically promises to force individual companies to do things he wants them to do, or else. He promises punishment to those who displease him, which appeals to the miserable man at the airport bar.

Take Ford Motor Co., which has factories in Mexico (it also has many factories in the U.S., including Louisville). The Detroit Free Press reported on Trump’s threats against Ford:

"Within 24 to 48 hours I will get a call from the head of Ford and he will say, 'Mr. President, we have decided we're going to build our new plant in the United States.' ... That's 100 percent sure. ... They're going to say, 'We're moving back. You want us to move to Michigan?' And I'll say, 'Yeah,'" the newspaper wrote of Trump’s boasts.

Trump previously threatened to slap a 35% tariff on Ford vehicles manufactured in Mexico as punishment for not following his orders. Never mind that Ford invests heavily in the United States already or that the president has no constitutional authority to single out any company for taxation.

And then there’s Apple, which Trump proclaims he will force to make their “damn” products in America. Never mind, as Forbes points out, that Apple already manufactures products in the U.S. (including part of the iPhone in Kentucky), or that the president has no constitutional authority to tell any company where to make stuff.

Ford and Apple can go to hell, Trump says, as we desperately search for that article of the Constitution enabling such a government-mandated trip.

“He’s not a king,” Sen. Rand Paul once said of Obama, a line that used to kill at Republican Party Lincoln Dinners. But would it among Trump supporters?

I was talking to a reporter writing about Trump’s rise due to “anger in the party and how the grassroots element seems to be mad at the establishment.” There’s no doubt, I told him, that people are angry, and that so-called establishment candidates are taking a beating. But that’s how the press explained the rise of the tea party in 2010.

That anger boosted candidates like Paul and Ted Cruz, who passionately railed against executive overreach in their successful campaigns for U.S. Senate. Today, Trump argues for more executive power. Much more. A scary amount. People are still angry, but Trump proposes the opposite remedy to an electorate that at least a portion of which used to believe their problems were rooted in Obama’s executive overkill.

News coverage simply explaining Trump’s support as “angry voters” misses this critical point. Republicans must not abandon the notion of a restrained presidency in favor of a rampaging executive unbound by facts or the Constitution.

The rise of an authoritarian figure like Trump should be anathema to the angry tea partiers who gave us Paul and Cruz, who consider a president using the levers of taxation to punish their enemies a serious threat to our nation. Surely we haven’t forgotten Obama’s IRS targeting his political enemies.

Do voters who previously hated Obama’s imperialism suddenly want more? Is it as simple as wanting to tell those they blame for any misery that has befallen them “to go to hell?”

For some, perhaps. It may also be that they have given up on everything else. Gallup’s “confidence in institutions” survey found just 8% of American have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in Congress, which is supposed to find solutions to national problems. Television and newspapers score just over 20%, institutions which are supposed to tell us the truth. Trump’s core supporters don’t believe anything the press says, as National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar observed.

People hate Congress, and people hate the media. Trump’s campaign is a war on both (literally, it seems, with the allegation surfacing that Trump’s campaign manager physically assaulted a reporter after a press conference last Tuesday). All else has failed, and so, through Trump, the angry, exasperated voters are telling them “to go to hell.”

Goodness knows Congress and the media establishment deserve our enmity. But the answer is not electing a president ignorant of the Constitution, his only guiding principle to tell the world “to go to hell.” Surely we are better than that. Conservatives, no matter how angry, should reject Trump’s short-term salve, which might kill the pain today but may lead to a more damaging infection tomorrow.